Long haul truckers frequently spend the night in the cabs of their trucks. In fact, many trucks are designed with sleeping areas. This necessitates environmental control and specifically heating and cooling. In order to provide this heating or cooling, the truck drivers generally leave the trucks running overnight to utilize the truck's heating or air conditioning system. The cumulative pollution created by these vehicles running overnight is very significant.
Further, although such trucks are in a position to receive radio signals, they are frequently located in positions where television signals are unavailable or weak and certainly no telephone connections are available to the truck itself.
Providing these services to a parked truck involves overcoming many practical and physical problems. Payment for these services is a concern as well as physically fitting the equipment needed to provide these services in a small space is problematic. Protecting this equipment from the environment is also a concern.
Apparatuses, such as those produced by IdleAire Technologies Corporation of Knoxville, Tenn., provide convenience services to a stationary vehicle independent of the vehicle electrical system. The apparatuses have an interface that couples to a vehicle to provide a substantially airtight fit allowing for a climate controlled environment. An example of such an apparatus can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 6,482,080 entitled “Apparatus for Providing Convenience Services to Stationary Vehicles” to Wilson et al., filed on Apr. 19, 2001, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,705,938 entitled “Apparatus for Controlling the Environment of a Parked Vehicle” to Everhart et al., filed on Sep. 11, 2002, the disclosures of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety.
However, even with these convenience services available, drivers sometimes continue to idle their engines while using the services. For example the drivers may believe their battery is not working well enough to restart an engine, or may forget to turn off his engine, or may desire more HVAC in extreme conditions.
Truck fleets report that they are concerned with cost control. Idling during DOT mandated HOS (Hours of Service) rule periods is very costly, approaching 4%-6% of a fleet's revenues. Using the convenience services above in addition to the idling is even more costly.
Therefore there is a need in the art to provide the convenience services to stationary vehicles while simultaneously determining if the vehicle's engine is idling in order to instruct drivers and inform fleets.